Day: May 31, 2018

Remember good old Barney Frank, the loudmouth former legislator from Massachusetts’ 4th District? (Even after 50 years in the Bay State, he still talks Joisey.) He’s gay and proud (having first outed himself privately in the late 70s and then publicly in 1987), and still sports a progressive patina that over time has become a tad tarnished.

He first showed up on my radar as a twenty-something grad student at Harvard’s Kennedy Institute of Politics who ditched his dissertation to work for the Mayor of Boston. He soon entered politics as a state rep, taking a law degree from Harvard while he served his west-of-Boston suburban constituency. By 1980 he was a Congress-critter, and by the time he bowed out in 2013 he had risen to Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee (demoted by the 2010 mid-terms to Ranking Member). Unless it happened in High School, he never lost an election. Continue reading “Franking Privileges: Barney and the Jet Set”

Search

Search for:

The Daily (or whenever) Eruption

DIY Sex Ed: Wednesday 5/22/19

As a callow, overweight youth just having graduated from Tween University with a degree in Acne, I felt certain stirrings and had heard certain rumors about “doing it.” One day I repeated a crude joke from the playground to my mom and followed up with:

“What’s a cunt?”

“Well,” she said, drawing a breath and letting it out, “it’s part of the female anatomy and I’ll leave it at that. I think you and your father should have a little talk about the birds and the bees.”

Assuming she had prepped Dad to have “the talk,” I waited for it to happen, face flushing whenever we menfolk were by ourselves, but he never did tell me anything about reproductive rites. But it wasn’t long before a little book that I didn’t think had been in our library mysteriously appeared on my bedspread, called Facts of Life and Love for Teenagers by a nice lady whose name I forget.

So I did what any 13-year-old would do: I immediately hid the book, lest a friend come by and notice it, and furtively read it in bed by flashlight, looking for the good parts. There was, alas, no mention of birds or bees. It occurred to me that I had never witnessed birds doing it, and certainly not bees, but perhaps those two houseflies I remembered seeing united in flight were making whoopee. It must be a thing, I figured, recalling listening to Noel Coward croon “Birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it” from our phonograph, but really, how do birds do it? Do they take off their feathers first? Do Bees lay aside their little stingers?